Jan Stedehouder has used PC-BSD for thirty days to see what living with it is like. On day thirty, he concludes: "Does PC-BSD have the potential to be a serious contender for the open source desktop? I answered that question with a yes, because the potential is there. The solid FreeBSD roots, the very strong and very accessible information, the friendly and mature community and the PBI system provide the foundations for that potential. I don't think it is ready now and I couldn't recommend it yet to someone in the early stages of moving away from Windows to an open source desktop. But I do think that the PC-BSD team has the right target audience in mind and is building an system and a support system that addresses it's needs."

before issuing your pkg_add -r command.
(If you use csh, change export to setenv and replace "=" with a space)

If you use "Latest", you simply specify the package name. If you use "All" you need to specify exact version. You can browse the ftp location above to see what is available. Most of these packages are in sync or a few minor version behind the ports, and are continously updated.